* Jive-Bomber at the Jalopy Journal asked this week which concept cars should be re-created, throwing out a few ideas, including the L’Universelle. It’s a valid question, and we have to wonder why (other than the expense and the time involved) more Fifties concept cars haven’t been replicated.

* The common misconception about the hemi heads that Mickey Thompson built for Ford V-8s in the Fifties was that they were simply reworked versions of Chrysler’s 392 hemi. Not so, writes Bill McGuire at Mac’s Motor City Garage, with plenty of details of what made the M/T hemi heads unique.

* Finally, Engine Swap Depot this week brought us the story of a Volkswagen Jetta with a VR6 up front – not bad, not bad – and a W8 where the rear seat used to be – resulting in perhaps the world’s only 14-cylinder Jetta.

Lloyd J. Wolf might have been peddling his auxiliary power units for over-the-road trucks by then, but in the mid-1960s not everybody felt it necessary to purchase a Dynassist to increase their load-carrying potential, as we can see from this one-off 1957 Diamond T 730C cabover featuring an unconventional power-adder and some owner-executed rhinoplasty.

The Geppetto to this Pinocchio, Frank Gripp Sr., ran Gripp Trucking out of Annawan, Illinois, from the 1940s through the 1990s, specializing in grain hauling among the rural communities that dotted Route 6 – and later, Interstate 80 – in the northwestern part of the state. By the mid-1960s, he’d hired his son, Frank Gripp Jr., as a driver, and the younger noted how the 450-cu.in. International Harvester Red Diamond six-cylinder gas engine in the tag-axle cabover couldn’t quite keep up with traffic.

The elder Gripp couldn’t afford a bigger truck for his son to drive, so he simply decided to tack on a helper engine. According to a 1988 Wheels of Time article by Gary Johnson, Gripp started off by mounting a Wisconsin air-cooled V-4 ahead of the stock RD450, linking the former to the latter’s crankshaft with air controls, but discovered that the Wisconsin couldn’t match the International in rotational speed, so he replaced the Wisconsin with a four-cylinder Jeep engine. The Jeep four-cylinder could match RPMs with the RD450, but didn’t provide all that much power, so he swapped it out for a 300-cu.in. Buick V-8, which seemed to satisfy the younger Gripp’s need for more power, as Johnson wrote.

The first trip out with it was a load of wheat going to Davenport, Iowa. Frank Sr. rode along, and he said they passed every car in Interstate 80 all the way to Davenport. The combination worked well, except the Diamond T’s clutch would slip when you stood on the throttle. This was remedied by stiffening the clutch springs.

According to Jim De Young, president of Adams Transit in Friedland Friesland, Wisconsin, who would later restore the truck, Gripp didn’t merely butt the Buick’s crankshaft up against the nose of the RD450′s. Instead, he included the Buick’s three-speed automatic transmission, ran its output shaft through a hole in the Diamond T’s radiator, and then bolted the output shaft to the International engine’s crank pulley. The torque converter in the Buick transmission took up the difference in engine speeds, De Young said, and Gripp’s air controls merely shifted the automatic transmission between neutral and third gear. The Diamond T’s throttle pedal worked both engines, and a hood and a home-built grille at least kept the second engine covered, if not blended in.

Photo by Gary Johnson.

Johnson noted that the Gripps built a second such cabover, but makes no other mention of it. The initial cabover reportedly served the Gripps until 1975, when rust removed it from the road. They nabbed the tag axle for one of their trailers and let it sit at their shop in Annawan. Sometime in the late 1980s, Gripp sold it to Mike Pagel, a Diamond T collector in Muscatine, Iowa, who in turn sold it, unrestored, to Adams Transit in the early 1990s.

“It was a piece of junk when we got it,” De Young said. “But there was no discussion to restore it back to stock; we wanted to make sure we preserved the unique drivetrain.”

Eight months later and using a second Diamond T/International COE cab (along with a Diamond T grille on the schnozz for effect), De Young and the Adams Transit crew finished the restoration. And then on the first post-restoration test drive, they almost crashed the truck.

“It’s not the safest truck to drive with all that weight out over the front axle,” De Young said. “She sure earned a warm spot in our hearts when we were loading it for shows.”

The twin-engine Diamond T remained in the Adams Transit collection until last year, when De Young had it and about 80 other trucks in the collection auctioned off. He said he believes it’s now in a truck museum just outside of Washington, D.C.

(Thanks to Howard Arbiture for tipping us off to this truck’s existence.)

Flour weighs a lot. Especially when you pile bags upon bags of the stuff and try to haul it anywhere, as Smeets of Roermond in the Netherlands discovered. Rather than buy a truck to deliver its flour, however, the bakery had another idea, one which resulted in perhaps the world’s only twin-engine, twin-grille Ford Model AA.

A bakery and flour dealer, Smeets needed an inexpensive hauler of about five tons’ capacity, company officials estimated. The only five-ton trucks on the market at that time far exceeded the company’s budget, according to Rutger Booy, writing for the Dutch site Conam, but two less expensive trucks with lighter weight ratings fell within its budget, so why not make one heavy truck out of two lighter ones and combine the weight ratings to get what they wanted?

It sounds ludicrous, especially considering Smeets wanted to use a pair of 1-1/2-ton Ford Model AAs, but Dutch industrial products company Konings stepped up to the challenge. Konings, founded in 1873, had a little bit of experience with automobiles back around the turn of the century, building about half a dozen cars based on the patents of Ferdinand Anderheggen of Amsterdam. With input from H.C. Olivier, Konings owner Leo Konings and engineer Charles Konings went to work in 1932, installing the drivetrains from both AAs side-by-side in one chassis. The front axle appears to be stock AA, but around back, Olivier and the Konings developed twin cardans – not entirely dissimilar to the setup that at least one Detroit twin-engine converter used about a decade later – that mounted the full rear suspension from both AA trucks as well as shortened single-wheel axles from both AA trucks.

Both AA grilles then covered the setback engines – much like Willard Morrison’s twin-grille Lincoln Zephyr – while the Konings mated both cabs to cover the width of the vehicle. According to Booy, the driver sat in the center of the cab and used one brake and one accelerator pedal, but shifted both transmissions independently with two different clutch pedals. It appears from the photos above that Konings refined the design for another “Siamese Twin” chassis (the one with twin 1932 Ford grilles), placing the driver at the far left of the cab – presumably they figured out how to shift both transmissions at once with that refinement.

Konings apparently showed the Siamese Twin once in 1933, and from the lead photo it appears as though they also custom built a trailer to go with it. Booy doesn’t say whether the company had production plans for the Twin, whether the final product cost less than contemporary five-ton trucks, or what happened to the Twin after Konings delivered it to Smeets.

* Low, sleek, chock full of advanced technology: the Dodge Charger III could have easily served as a prop for a futuristic sci-fi TV show or movie, but instead debuted as an idea car at the Chicago Motor Show in 1968. CarDesignNews has more on it and its post-show circuit fate.

* As Ronan Glon at Ran When Parked informed us this week, “basket” apparently means “sneaker” in French. Why do we care? Because of the limited edition Citroën 2CV Basket of the Seventies, a tin snail painted to look like a sneaker.

Perfect for toodling down to the corner market or maybe taking in the occasional Sunday drive is this 1932 Ford sedan delivery for sale on Hemmings.com. Open headers make it efficient (no cumbersome exhaust restrictions to decrease your fuel mileage), and it’s reliable, too, with a redundant blown Hemi V-8 with its own fuel, ignition, and cooling system, should the first blown Hemi V-8 ever give up the ghost. From the seller’s description:

It is street legal, but nowhere close to normal. Each engine produces 1,250 horsepower. Each motor has its own fuel system, starter, alternator, and computer system. Both motors can be tuned separately with a laptop computer and then joined together. This is all on a chassis custom engineered to handle 2,500 horsepower paired with a fiberglass Gibbon body.

The 2 engines are identical where each engine is made up of a Keith Black all aluminum 572ci Hemi, Eagle crank & rods, Ross 9.2 CR custom pistons, Competition flat tappet cam shaft, Milodon gear drives, Milodon 8qt oil system, Stage 5 custom aluminum cylinder heads, Stage 5 rockers, Hi Tech tube seals, Blower Shop Billet 871 aluminum blowers, MSD crank trigger ignitions (6 AL) with power boost retard, and Fast XTI computers. The fuel system is a Fast controlled EFI Tuner, 68lb HR injectors, Enderle Buzzard injector hats, Weldon fuel pumps & filters, and custom IAC system. The #2 radiator is in the rear and both radiators are fed by 2 inline Mezier high flow water pumps that circulate thru both motors. The 2 speed Pro Mod style powerglide is a full manual shift transmission with a fan controlled cooler. The custom 3000 stall converter is by Neil Chance. The rear differential is a Mosier Dana 60 with 3.54 ratio, Detroit locker, and 35 spline axles. There are Wilwood disc brakes in the front & rear. The stainless front axle assembly is from TCI (Total Cost Involved) Engineering. The body was made by Gibbons Fiberglass works. The flawless paint and body work was done by Troxel Specialty Cars. Interior was custom done by Brian Bohde of Indiana. There is also a dual nitrous setup with LED lit up purges (you know….for the kids).

This is a one of a kind machine that has never been raced. It has been trailered around to shows and events winning many awards including 1st at the Detroit Autorama and Car of the Year at the Cavalcade of Wheels show in South Bend.

Our friend Charles Beesley is back at it with more photos of unusual cars. This time, it’s one we already know, but worth taking another look at: Lou Fageol’s twin-engine Porsche 356, shot in August 1953 at Paine Field in Everett, Washington, during the Seattle Seafair SCCA races. This would be the predecessor of Fageol’s more radical Twin-Porsche, another dual-engined car that Fageol raced in 1954 and 1955. It apparently debuted at the Seafair races and DNF’d with clutch problems there, but Fageol did finish as high as third in subsequent races and campaigned it through 1959 with George Peterson (unless, that is, the record has this car and the Twin-Porsche confused).

These three photos recently showed up in our inbox courtesy Charles Beesley, he of the excellent Reservatory.net. As Charles noted, they depict the famous Kenz and Leslie 777 twin-engine streamliner at Bonneville in 1950, the year that driver Willie Young pushed the streamliner past 200 MPH. Charles wrote:

Bill Kenz founded a Ford V8 specialty shop in Denver, Colorado with Roy Leslie in 1938, the pair having raced midgets together before that. Kenz’s first dry lakes burner was a ’31 Model A pickup with Edelbrock equipped flathead V8s at either end, the rear mill bolted directly to a quick change rear end with swing axles and torsion bars. The ungainly Odd Rod confounded skeptics by turning 140 mph at the first Bonneville National Speed Trials in 1949. Suitably encouraged, Kenz spent the next year building a more refined version of the concept – the flatheads now snug in a custom steel tube bridge frame beneath a smooth aluminum shell pierced only for intake and exhaust and the driver’s head. With Willie Young at the wheel, the ice blue 777 streamliner became the first hot rod to break the 200 mph barrier at Bonneville in 1950. A 255 mph run in 1952 made Young the first American to exceed 250 mph on land. With sponsorship from the Rocky Mountain Ford Dealers Association, Floyd Clymer, Wynn’s Friction Proofing and Bob Jones Skyland Ford, 777 ran well into the fifties, eventually with a third V8 where the cockpit had been, hanging the driver off the back, slingshot dragster style. The machine was finally retired in 1957 after posting a trap speed of over 270 mph.

The streamliner does still exist today, housed in a museum in Denver.

By the way, if you went on over to the Fran Hernandez Facebook page we linked to the other day, you’d likely have run across the below photo of another Kenz and Leslie 777, this one a Mercury Comet set up for drag racing in 1966. As with Hernandez, somebody needs to compile a biography of the Kenz and Leslie partnership.